russ

NOISE

DEJAN STRETENOVIC

...whistles, trumpets, saxophones, guitars, sirens, bells, firecrackers, voices, hands, drums, snares, rattles, cowbells, pots, kettles, pans, rubbish bins, vacuum cleaners, motorbikes, megaphones, radio...
Civil protests in Belgrade (winter 1996/97) will be remembered for, among other things, the deafening noise which resonated through the city, created by an arsenal of various instruments and noisemakers. The production of noise began spontaneously, straight out of Belgrade's techno-clubs; the ravers brought their whistles, symbol of the protest, out into the streets. Then came the rock drummers adding percussion and football fans with noisemakers of their own. Soon they were joined by other demonstrators who quickly adopted noise as a genuine means of resistance, a concept which was developed through various noise-making activities. The noise was a synthesis of various musical and other cultural codes, the individual identity of each lost in a fusion which became the genuine Voice of the protest. This gradually became more and more articulated in the form of a sound happening or event, which brought a cultural impact to the political protest, an impact which earlier street protests had not had, having been wrapped only in ideological criticism. Moreover, the political and cultural resonance of the protest became so intertwined that neither of them could be explained without the other. However it should be emphasized that it was the political actions which were parasites on the provocative and subversive character of the cultural actions. These included, in addition to the noise, happenings, actions, performances, concerts, radio programs, lectures, exhibitions, distribution of printed matters, placarding, etc.

What was remarkable about these actions was the new awareness of the use of the media, where media was not only a technological artifact, but also a method of communication, opening various spaces, channels and platforms for production, transmission and decoding of messages. These were mobile, performative and pragmatic "tactical media" (David Garcia and Geert Lovinck), which functioned by being flexibly adaptable to circumstances and created events and situations in dynamic interaction with state-controlled media, police brutality, censorship and bannings. When the police physically prevented protest marches, confining the noise transmission to the local area, the noise production spread like an epidemic throughout the entire city, into public and private places. The protest itself was also dispersed into local events in the city's municipalities and noise production during the prime-time news on state television. When indenpendent Radio B92 and Radio Index were banned, their programs were broadcast on foreign radio networks, on the Internet, and printed for distribution. Tactical media, according to Lovinck and Garcia, are the media of crisis, criticism and opposition. They are also the traditional weapons of marginalised groups and subcultures, which resist media monopoly and repression by creating their own alternative media space for various critical discourses, artistic idioms and media languages.
Awareness of the potential and limitations of media is one of the main features of the tactical media which, simultaneously with the communication of information, apply a critical analysis to the dominant systems of representation, and a deconstructive process to the very language of media, bearing out the McLuhan principle that "the medium is the message." Tactical media punctuate the very process of mediation as a work station of media manipulation and transformation of reality, attempting to break away from the representational function by insisting on transgressive, unstable and "impure" forms and relations. In his essay "Invisible Generation" (1966), William Burroughs discusses the subversive potential of thousands of people armed with megaphones parodying the speech of a President, accompanied by banal and mocking sound effects. Burroughs concludes that the sound effects of rebellion can produce rebellion itself by moving both sides - demonstrators and police - from a state of expectancy to a state of active confrontation, convinced that the rebellion has already begun. The performative effect of this ritual of naming the rebellion is based on the tactical use of the media, not to convey the message, because in fact there is no message, but to produce events, possibly even revolution, through the process of media action, as Burroughs believed. It is what Lacan calls "reflexive determination" of the subject in the ideological field, whose political behavior is determined by the social relations among things which, as Lacan asserts, "believe in their place instead of subjects." Although the noise represents the sound settings of the everyday urban life to which everyone is accustomed, its exploitation to extreme limits produces the effect of forcefulness, which polarizes all participants in the political crisis into opposing camps with different criteria of evaluation, but a common belief in the disruptive nature of noise. While the state apparatus and state media condemned the noise production, saying it disturbed public peace and order, the demonstrators quoted aphorisms about free speech and political opinion. One demonstrator beaten by police reported that the policemen had ordered him to stamp on his whistle, which clearly shows how a trivial object, under certain circumstances, has the value of a subversive weapon, capable of triggering police brutality. Chaotic and amorphous, noise is an apotheosis of the death of language, "a planet of a thousand hysterical functions of language" (D.Kahn) and, as such, it cannot create meaning by itself, but the intention with which it is made in a particular context or structure gives it meaningful coordinates. This makes its economy of destruction effective in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the word. So, for example, the song "Noise is in Fashion", recorded more than a decade ago by the Belgrade band Disciplina Kicme (the first band on the Belgrade rock scene to use elements of noise), had no impact outside music at the time, but with the appearance of the noise in the streets, it became an unofficial anthem of the protest. The tactical use of noise consists of attempts to symbolically topple the repressive discourse of the governing ideology and its media by simple deafening, the destruction of meaning and negation of any sense, where the noise has served as a major agent. The most prominent theoretician of political economics of noise, Jacques Attali, claims that noise is "an attack on the code which makes the structure of the message", a technical incident (in the case of electronic media), a virus which introduces murmuring, distortion and jamming, which creates chaos and disorder in media channels, which disrupts the code or disturbs the transmission. It would be Utopian to believe that noise could empirically deconstruct the discourse practiced by the governing ideology, but it can, as a genuine Voice of the protest, signal that something is wrong with the media and the way in which we receive messages. The governing ideology uses programmed mutation, permutation and liquidation of codes in order to undermine the classic opposition between reality and illusion, depriving events and entities of their ideas, references, origin and sense. In this situation, noise functions as an extreme metaphor for this ideological and media pollution, using persiflage and exaggeration to make this pollution obvious and prominent by reproducing and amplifying its catastrophic effects to the brink of auditory endurance, the threshold of pain. Essentially, the only empirical effect of noise is the somatic one: a strong sound is not only heard by the auditory organs, but also by the skull and body, which function as resonators and transmit sound vibrations into the auditory system, thus stimulating the nervous system. In that sense noise has the value of "repressive desublimation" (H. Marcuse): it answers verbal and physical violence with the violence of sound and it answers media pollution with the audible pollution of public space. Perhaps the tactic of using noise in street protests could best be described with the help of Debord's picturesque description of the Situationist Internationale actions: "There where the fire was burning, we were adding fuel."

However this "art of noise" is not only a feedback of the ideological and media "Babylon confusion". It is also a unique form of ridicule of the governing ideology's discourse in the distorted mirror of noise. In terms of Sloterdijk's definition of cynicism as a popular, plebeian mockery of cultural values through irony and sarcasm, it could by said that the Belgrade noise production was a typical cynical act, confronting the pathetic discourse of the governing ideology and the serious rhetoric of its media with the banality of noise and the carnival spirit of the protest as a whole. Cynical anti-philosophy represents a form of "rough enlightenment" (Sloterdijk) which uses subversive gestures, shameless transgression of social norms of behavior through scandals and incidents, and jokes. It provokes the regulation of social conventions about sense and meaning, confronting them with the banal facts of life. Cynical radicalism is one of the main weapons of the historical avant-garde whose anti-aesthetic activities are based on the brutal intrusion of the real - both banal and ephemeral - into aesthetic processes, with the intention of causing media and cultural turbulence. This was the case with the futurist bruitisme and Duchamp's ready-mades.
On the other hand, claims Sloterdijk, cynicism is a dominating form of functioning of the ideology which is aware of the discrepancy between objective reality and its ideological mask, and which always insists on the mask, because it is the ideology's last resort and its formal matrix. The material existence of ideology is contained in ideological practice - in rituals, institutions and media - and it has no other defense mechanism but to interpose a cynical distance and paralyze each critical discourse which tries to remove the mask. So when the transmissions of Radio B92 vanished, the general manager of the government controlled Radio-Television of Serbia, which owns the transmitter used by B92, cynically explained that "water got into the coaxial cable", although the entire public knew very well that it was purely a political decision and the initiative went back directly to the general manager himself. At the same time, the Zepter company launched a series of television commercials for their saucepans in which citizens were shown making noise, thus proving the quality of the product. The public, by and large, failed to notice the cynical marketing philosophy expressed by this commercial which commodified noise production by turning it into harmless family fun.
In one of his essays Jacques Derrida underlines the distinction between the disembodied "male form of communication" based on the metaphysics of inscription and transmission, and the bodily "female form of communication", based on the direct, oral exchange of messages. While the "male form of communication" marks each discourse of power which technically records and structures reality, the "female form of communication" reflects the direct, primordial reality of the body and voice. The mediated voice is a disembodied phantom which merely simulates the sensual character of live speech. What is lost in the process of the mediation is the sonority of the sound and listening. Noise production encloses the Copernican turn in media space: the voice tears itself out of the media process and returns to the body through the collective, cathartic enjoyment of noise inside the homogenous space of its production and transmission.
The voice here has a multiple symbolism: the protest began because of the electoral theft, but the voices of the cheated voters are now reproduced and amplified in the noise which functions as a unique vox populi.* When Radio B92 broadcast the 7.30 p.m. noise production live, with phone-ins from the noisemakers, it was not just media transmission of noise, but an attempt to promote noise into something really present, as a genuine sound event in situ. The radio broadcasts of the noise returned the noise to itself by not subjecting it to the media process but rather localizing it at its very source, mapping its presence in various parts of the city by initiating a competition for noise production among the municipalities of the city. In this way Radio B92 began to function as tactical media which, like Burrough's megaphones, created events and served as their superconductor, connecting far-flung nexuses of resistance and opening a channel for communication among them.
Depriving Belgrade's independent radio stations of their frequencies introduced silence, the typical answer of every totalitarian ideology to the dissonant voices in the air, manifested by suppression and supervision of the noise, as in Oriental despotism. A French traveler of the seventeenth century remarked that more noise was heard in one day in the marketplace in Paris than in a year in the whole city of Istanbul. Silence gladdens the despot's heart, allowing his own voice to be multiplied through his mediators and return, undistorted, to its creator. This despotic, gramophonic "listening to one's own voice" (Merlau-Ponty) demonstrates that there is only one absolute master of language who accepts no dialogue and for whom silence provides a feeling of domination and control. But the introduction of silence through bans and censorship in the middle of political crisis made the ideological machine very visible and identified it as despotic, which caused a chain reaction from the domestic and international public, leading to the reinstatement of the banned radio stations. Paradoxical or not, this victory was achieved not by noise, but by silence, which is another extreme phenomenon, the zero point of language, the sign of its death and disappearance, which is much more effective than the chaotic sound of the noise ambiance. It was silence which exorcised the ideological specters that governed the political and media space in Serbia.
The noise, therefore, was both the hero and the tragic victim of these protests, their motor, whose energy was constantly spent and replenished, right up to the moment when complete silence returned to power and the whistles were returned to where they came from - the techno-clubs.

Translated into English from Serbian by GORAN DMITRIEVIC
Text is illustrated by pictures of the action "Barricade" by Anatoli Osmolovski in Moscow (may 18th, 1998) - foto: Dmitri Gutov

* In Serbian language the word "glas" means both voice and vote.

Dejan Stretenovic
Born in 1962 in Belgrad (Yugoslavia) Critic and curator. Head Curator, Center for Contemporary Art, Belgrad. Author and redactor of "Art in Yugoslavia 1992-1995". Lives in Beldrad.
© 1998 - Dejan Stretenovic / Moscow Art Magazine N°22





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